It’s day three of the scandal in which President Trump’s top advisers accidentally allowed a journalist for The Atlantic onto a highly sensitive discussion of a military operation. The latest: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth offered an incredibly weak defense of this travesty. Atlantic journalist Jeffrey Goldberg revealed most of the text chain, which contained lots of operational detail. And Trump is reportedly frustrated over this story, and his top allies are deeply exasperated by his team’s handling of it. We talked to Vox’s Zack Beauchamp, author of a new piece on the scandal’s undercurrents, about the deeper meaning of all these developments—what they say about the failures of right-wing populist and MAGA governance—and about the deeper schisms inside MAGA ideology. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.
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Trump Privately Seethes at Text Fiasco as Hegseth’s New Spin Implodes
As Trump reportedly grows “frustrated” over his team’s failure to manage media coverage of the war text scandal, a shrewd observer of the right explains how all this reveals the deeper failings of MAGA.
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